And that created a whole new mystery to think about. And a painful one at that.
Ballard
30
Ballard started her shift at the Watch Three roll call. Nothing had been left in her inbox by day-watch detectives so she went upstairs to roll call to get a take on what was happening out on the street. Lieutenant Washington was holding forth at the podium, another sign that it was shaping up as a slow night. He usually had a sergeant handle roll call while he remained in the watch office monitoring what was happening outside.
Washington called out the teams and their assigned reporting districts.
“Meyer, Shuman: six-A-fifteen.”
“Doucette and Torborg: six-A-forty-five.”
“Travis and Marshall, you’ve got forty-nine tonight.”
And so on. He announced that State Farm was continuing its stolen-car program, awarding uniform pins to officers who recovered five stolen cars or more during the monthlong campaign. He mentioned that some of the officers in roll call had reached five already and some were stalled at three or four. He wanted shift-wide compliance. Otherwise there was not much out there to talk about. Roll call ended with a warning from the watch commander:
“I know these nights have been slow out there but it will pick up. It always does,” Washington said. “I don’t want anybody submarining. Remember, this isn’t like the old days. I’ve got your GPS markers on my screen. I see anybody circling the fort, they’re going to get the three-one for next DP.”
Submarining was a team leaving their assigned patrol area and cruising close to the station so they could return quickly when the shift was over, and the call went out that the first watch teams were down and heading out. Six-A-thirty-one, the patrol area farthest from the station, consisted mostly of East Hollywood, where nuisance calls — homeless and drunk and disorderly — were more frequent. Nobody wanted to work the three-one, especially for a twenty-eight-day deployment period (DP), so it was usually assigned to someone on the watch commander’s shit list.
“All right, people,” Washington said. “Let’s get out there and do good work.”
The meeting broke up but Renée stayed seated so she could speak to Washington after the uniformed officers left the room. He saw her waiting and knew the score.
“Ballard, what’s up?”
“L-T, you got anything for me?”
“Not yet. You got something going?”
“I got a couple leftover things from last night, a phone number I need to trace. Let me know when I’m needed.”
“Roger that, Ballard.”
Ballard went back down the stairs and into the detective bureau, where she set up in a corner as usual. She opened her laptop and pulled up the wiretap software on the off chance that Elvin Kidd decided to make a phone call or send a midnight tweet. She knew it was probably a long shot but the clock was ticking on the seventy-two-hour wiretap, so it couldn’t hurt to keep the channel open in case she got lucky again.
She set to work tracing the number that Kidd had sent the text to after receiving the jail call from Dennard Dorsey. Her first step was just to run it through a Google database containing a reverse phone directory. That produced nothing. A search on Lexis/Nexis was also fruitless, indicating the number was unlisted. She next signed into the department database and ran a search to see if the number had ever been entered into a crime report or other document collected by the department. This time she got lucky. The number had turned up on a field interview card four years earlier. It had been digitized in the department-wide database and she was able to call it up on the workstation’s computer screen.
The field interview was conducted by a South Bureau gang intel team that had stopped to talk to a man loitering outside a closed restaurant at Slauson and Keniston Avenues. Ballard pegged this location as just on the border between Los Angeles and Inglewood — and firmly in Rolling 60s territory. The man’s name was Marcel Dupree. He was fifty-one years old and, though he denied membership in a gang, he had a tattoo of the Crips’ six-pointed star on the back of his left hand.
According to the FI card, Dupree told the officers who stopped him that he was waiting to be picked up by a girlfriend because he’d had too much to drink. Seeing that no crime had been committed, they filled in an FI card — including cell phone number, home address, birth date, and other details — and left the man where they had found him.
Ballard next entered Marcel Dupree’s name into the crime index computer and pulled up a record of numerous arrests and at least two convictions dating back thirty-three years. Dupree had served two prison terms, one for armed robbery and the other for discharging a firearm into an occupied dwelling. What was more important than all of that was that there was a felony warrant out for Dupree for not paying child support. It wasn’t much, but Ballard now had something she could try to squeeze him with if necessary.
She spent the next hour pulling up individual arrest reports and more than once found descriptions of Dupree that called him a shot caller in the Rolling 60s Crips. The child support beef had gone to a felony warrant because Dupree owed more than $100,000 in child support to two different women going back three years.
Ballard was excited. She had just connected two of the dots in the Kidd investigation, and she had something on Dupree she might be able to use to further the investigation. She felt like telling Bosch but guessed he might be asleep. She downloaded the most recent DMV shot of Dupree, which was four years old, along with his last mug shot, which was a decade older. In both he had a perfectly round head and bushy, unkempt hair. Ballard included both photos in a text to Bosch. She wanted him to know what Dupree looked like before they set up their surveillance operation the next day.
She didn’t know whether Bosch had a text chime set on his phone but there was no reply after five minutes. She picked up the rover she had taken from a charger at the start of shift and radioed Lieutenant Washington that she was taking a code 7 — a meal break — but would have her rover with her as usual. She walked through the station’s deserted back lot to her city car and headed out.
There was an all-night taco truck in a parking lot at Sunset and Western. Ballard ate there often and knew Digoberto Rojas, the man who operated it. She liked to practice her Spanish on him, more often than not confusing him with her mix of Spanish and English.
This night he was working alone and Ballard asked him in halting Spanish where his son was. The young man had worked with his father most nights until recently. The last two or three times Ballard had gone to the truck, Digoberto was working alone. This concerned her because it made him a more vulnerable target. They spoke through the truck’s counter window as Digoberto made her a pair of shrimp tacos.
“He lazy,” Digoberto said. “He want to hang out all day with his vatos. Then he say he too tired to come to work.”
“You want me to come talk to him,” Ballard said, dropping the Spanish. “I will.”
“No, is okay.”
“Digoberto, I don’t like you working out here at night by yourself. It’s dangerous working alone.”
“What about you? You alone.”
“It’s different.”
She lifted the flap on her jacket to show the gun holstered on her hip. Then she held up the rover.
“I call, my friends come running,” she said.
“The police, they protect me,” Digoberto said. “Like you.”
“We can’t be here all the time. I don’t want to get a call and find out you got robbed or hurt. If your son won’t help you, then find somebody who will. You really need to.”